Handmade pizza with spring onions, prosciutto, balsamic, and egg

handmade pizza with spring onions, prosciutto, balsamic, and egg // a thousand threads
If something is already delicious, chances are it can be improved by the presence of an egg. Burgers, fried rice, ham & cheese sandwiches, sweet potatoes… probably not oatmeal or chocolate cake, but certainly pizza, with one caveat. Those eggs are slippery little buggers.

I’m not going to say that every recipe attempt goes well in our house… this pizza dough is the result of trial and error dating back to the beginning of our relationship. There’ve been hard pizzas, soft pizzas, too-thick pizzas, too-healthy pizzas, and a little bit of everything in between. Most have been pretty decent… but not like this one. This is the one that goes in the vault.

I have to hand it to that bread-baking husband of mine for cracking the code, the pizza is truly delicious and better than anything I’ve ever had at home — but that’s just the beginning of this story. This story is about eggs.

handmade pizza with spring onions, prosciutto, balsamic, and egg // a thousand threads
Earlier in this already super-busy week, Mark was home cooking a few of these guys, prepping for a nighttime shoot we planned to squeeze in between work and sleep. When I walked through the door around eight o’clock, there sat the most perfect little pizza, with homemade sauce, prosciutto, the best, most ideal mix of cheese, and a gorgeous egg (cooked perfectly, I might add, with its beautiful farmers-market-orange yolk still bright and soft) on top.

A second pizza was already in the oven on its way.

It being around eight o’clock and my being half starved after a long day at work and a longer trip home, I jumped on the pizza like it was my last meal. I may have asked somewhere along the way if it was okay, but the answer didn’t really matter… I’d already grabbed the knife and set into chopping it up, breaking that fantastic yolk all over each piece.

handmade pizza with spring onions, prosciutto, balsamic, and egg // a thousand threads
3/4 of the way through devouring it whole, Mark cracked an egg on the second pizza, watching as it slid a little, then a lot… all the way down to the pan.

Okay, well… shit, we thought. Try, try again right?

Mark scraped up the egg, bumped up the side it slid off of with a little more prosciutto and cheese, and cracked another. That’s when it all went to hell.

handmade pizza with spring onions, prosciutto, balsamic, and egg // a thousand threadshandmade pizza with spring onions, prosciutto, balsamic, and egg // a thousand threads
Instead of sliding politely to the pizza stone as the first egg had, this little rogue traveled all the way down the back of the stone, catching just the slightest bit of air as it tumbled headlong into the convection fan at the back of the oven and slid down the side, cracking and popping along the way to settle and burn at the bottom of the oven.

We kept our cool, but the dog definitely started to panic – the smoke detectors in our house are so sensitive that the toaster has been known to set them off, and while at this point the kid barely notices, the dog has a panic attack every time one of us steps on a chair for fear it might have something to do with those evil, screaming boxes on the ceiling.

So, at nine o’clock at night, we turned off the oven, scrubbed it out, and started over.

handmade pizza with spring onions, prosciutto, balsamic, and egg // a thousand threads
But this time I wasn’t taking any chances. After a new pizza had finished its first shift in the oven, Mark pulled it out, cracked an egg on top and I hit the damn thing with a blow torch for a few second to hold it in place.

I still feel pretty brilliant for this total cheat, and maintain that because of their total unpredictability it may be my egg-on-pizza strategy from here on out. But if you decide to do it too, there are a couple of things you have to know. First, let the egg spread out a little before you touch it with the torch. If you try to keep in perfectly in place it’ll just look funny. Second, you should not, under any circumstances, touch the yolk with the torch. Just hit it a little bit around the edges on the whites. The egg will stick and you can throw that baby back into the oven with the confidence that it won’t scare the hell out of your dog and kill your whole night.

Because that’s what we really all care about, right? Getting our pictures taken of our pizza at a decent hour, rather than well into the night because some crazy lady cut up and devoured our perfect, picture-worthy pizza and left us with no choice but to torch an egg?

Of course it is. It’s okay, we’re totally on the same page.

handmade pizza with spring onions, prosciutto, balsamic, and egg // a thousand threads
Handmade pizza dough
2 3/4 cup cold water
1 1/2 tablespoons salt
1 tablespoon sugar
2 packets yeast
1/4 cup good olive oil
6 1/2 cups flour

Mix all ingredients, being careful not to overmix. Put the dough in a non-airtight covered container to rise to twice its volume, 4-5 hours. Can be made up to five days in advance and kept in the refrigerator.

Makes 4 small pizzas.

Pizza with spring onions, prosciutto, balsamic, and egg
2 1/2 cup mozzarella, shredded
2 1/2 cup provolone, shredded
1 cup of your favorite sauce (we make our own with tomatoes and roasted garlic)
8-12 slices prosciutto
4 eggs
2 spring onions, green parts diced
Balsamic glaze

Place a pizza stone on the middle rack of your oven and preheat to 500 degrees.

For each small-medium sized pizza, cut a grapefruit-sized portion of dough from your mix (no need to pound down or knead) and roll to 1/4 inch thickness. Top with 1/4 cup sauce, then a generous 1/2 cup of each cheese and 2-3 slices prosciutto, cut and arranged to your liking.

Lift with pizza peel and place on hot stone and cook until light golden brown, 8 minutes or so.

Remove from oven, crack egg on top (maybe use my trick above and torch the sides a bit to hold it in place) then place back in oven until crust is dark golden brown and white of egg is firm, around 8-10 minutes.

Remove from oven, top with spring onions and balsamic glaze.

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